Still life and landscape painter. Occasionally he also painted portraits.

Son of a printer. Bernardus was the eldest of seven children. When he was seven years old his father moved his business to Rotterdam, where Bernardus would spent his youth.

Arps studied at the Fine Arts Academy of Rotterdam and at the Delft University of Technology. Until 1893, aged 28, he worked in his father’s printing office in Rotterdam. His father, who had a very authoritarian character, had obliged him in 1893, one year after his marriage with Anna Adriana van Rossem, who was an aquarel painter, to leave the company. Arps then decided to become a fulltime painter.

Bernardus Arps lived and worked in The Hague from 1906 until 1921, and in Oosterbeek, near Arnhem, until his death.

Arps almost never dated his paintings. It seems that after 1924 he did not paint that often any more.

He started painting landscapes (belonging to the Veluwezoom School), but once he had moved to The Hague he specialised in still life painting for he had much more success with these.

Why should you by this painting?

Because it is a typical painting of the Interbellum with its monochrome tonalities and an Art Deco-like style, making it more interesting than the bulk of Arps’s other still lifes.